Duluth police launch Transparency Hub with crime, stop data

Duluth police have put years of crime, stop and drone records into a single mobile-friendly Transparency Hub, giving residents a faster way to test how the department uses stops, searches and public-safety technology in Minnesota’s third-largest municipal police department.

The change is mostly about access, not new disclosures. The City of Duluth says the information already lived on the department’s website, but it was scattered across separate pages. The hub brings together a crime map, stop data, a Drone as First Responder flight log and other datasets in one place, with each dashboard refreshed on its own schedule.

That matters because the core records are now easier to compare. Duluth’s crime map dashboard shows reported incidents from the past three years, while stop-data collection began in the fourth quarter of 2021. In the department’s archived stop-data report, officers completed 19,144 stop-data entries from January 2022 through December 2024, including 5,944 in 2022, 6,666 in 2023 and 6,534 in 2024.

The same report gives residents a clearer look at how those stops ended. Warnings accounted for 80.6% of entries, citations for 12.7%, arrests for 3.0% and no action for 3.6%. Moving violations made up 59.9% of stops, equipment violations 36.4% and suspicious activity 3.7%. Officers also conducted 763 searches during stops.

For people trying to follow police accountability in Duluth, that is the practical value of the hub. It makes it easier to check stop patterns, look for shifts in reported crime and see how often drones are deployed, without hunting through multiple pages. The public-facing Drone as First Responder log also adds a clearer window into a technology-driven piece of policing that many residents have wanted to understand more fully.

The hub does not replace the department’s other transparency materials. It sits alongside annual reports, a complaint accountability report and archived stop-data reports, which means the broader accountability picture still requires more than one page. But the city’s own record shows the department has been building toward this point for years: it expanded its Unmanned Aerial System operation in October 2022, launched a crime map dashboard in the 2024 annual report and made that dashboard mobile friendly in June 2025.

Chief Mike Ceynowa, named police chief in September 2022, has described the effort as part of building trust with the community. The new hub makes that promise easier to evaluate, because the records are now centralized, current on separate update cycles and far simpler for the public to scrutinize.